MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revealed Wednesday that she and her team were the targets of a Russian disinformation campaign, and it seems she wasn’t the only one.
According to NBC News reporter Ben Collins, those who got direct messages from the Russian accounts found the information either complicated or obviously false.
“Thankfully, I think they thought reporters were stupid,” Collins said. “We’re not this stupid. A bunch of us looked into this at the time. They sent it to a ThinkProgress reporter and a researcher named Josh Russell and they didn’t even know it was to be the hack of the Russian investigation. We didn’t know what it was, therefore, we couldn’t intuit the larger grand scheme that it was supposed to be [Robert] Mueller being incompetent based on this stuff.”
Court documents released by special counsel’s office Wednesday said that the documents released on a Russian website were altered and falsified to make it seem as if the investigation was either a fraud or being bungled.
“It was a long tail mess-up some time back in November that’s now surfacing,” said Collins.
He called it a kind of “Russian doll situation,” but reporters who attempted to fact-check the information couldn’t even open the first Russian doll.